Intel has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase software developer Havok, Inc. Havok provides various software development tools to digital animation and game developers and is one of the largest providers for software physics.

“Havok is a proven leader in physics technology for gaming and digital content, and will become a key element of Intel’s visual computing and graphics efforts,” said Renee J. James, Intel vice president and general manager of Software and Solutions Group.

“This is a great fit for Havok products, customers and employees,” remarked Havok CEO David O’Meara. “Intel’s scale of technology investment and customer reach enable Havok with opportunities to grow more quickly into new market segments with new products than we could have done organically. We believe the winning combination is Havok’s technology and customer know-how with Intel’s scale. I am excited to be part of this next phase of Havok’s growth.”

A recent trend is to offload physics processing to either a GPU or dedicated physics processor. So far, though, Ageia, ATI, and NVIDIA have not made much headway in the physics market.

Both NVIDIA and ATI have previewed CrossFire and SLI Physics, however, neither company has delivered any actual physics hardware yet. It’s pretty interesting to note that both ATI and NVIDIA’s physics solutions rely on Havok FX. However, it is unlikely that Intel’s acquisition of Havok will affect Havok’s partnership with either AMD or NVIDIA.

“Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry,” said Renee J. James regarding the future of Havok.

Essentially, Havok will operate as a subsidiary of Intel and will continue to operate as an independent business. This reinforces the belief that current partnerships will not be affected.

Havok has partnerships with many of the largest names in the gaming community such as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, NVIDIA, and AMD. Havok has provided software physics for games like Halo 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Half Life 2 and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.

In addition to providing software that adds physics realism to games, Havok also provides physics for professional software such as Autodesk’s 3DS Studio Max 9.

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The kinds of operations involved in physics calculations aren't very different from existing SIMD instructions. The real issue is that physics, like graphics, needs massive memory bandwidth. Which Intel's current designs cannot deliver. Until Intel changes its architecture to something closer to AMD's (which should happen with the introduction of CSI), it would be pointless to add any "physics instructions", just as it would be pointless to duplicate GPU instructions on the CPU, because there simply wouldn't be enough bandwith to keep those parts of the CPU fed.

My guess is Intel's move is related to something completely different: consoles. Intel needs some competitive advantage to get back into the console business, and by buying Havok not only to they gain an edge in terms of existing physics APIs, but they also strike a blow against nVidia's "Havok FX" hardware acceleration.

ATI was rumoured to be working on a physics API of its own, but it's not clear if AMD is interested in pushing that forward at this time (they probably have other things to worry about, such as actually turning in a profit).

Havok will be highly optimized for Intel chips (and probably "highly deoptimized" for AMD chips), but given Intel's system architecture it cannot really compete with dedicated physics hardware.

So the biggest loser here is nVidia (they were the ones working on hardware acceleration for Havok). The biggest winner might turn out to be... Ageia.

Hi, I think Intel's compiler doesn't deoptimize for AMD processors. It just doesn't optimize for their particular implementation. Even though AMD's support for X86 doesn't mean they have to follow Intel's design guidelines. Just as long as whatever they do produces exactly the same result as Intel's everything is fine.

Anyway, Intel's C++ compiler does "unoptimize" some code for AMD CPUs. It turns off some optimizations that are perfectly compatible with the K8 and above. Simply changing the CPU manufacturer id string from "authenticamd" to "genuineintel" will make some code run faster.

If Intel deliberately made all code run slower on AMD chips, they'd be exposing themselves to another anti-trust lawsuit, so what they do is turn off some (AMD-compatible) optimizations using the pretext that "they don't know whether they're compatible or not".

Not very ethical, perhaps, but perfectly legal and "fair", IMO. It's up to AMD to deliver an optimized compiler for their chips, or help the people making VC++, gcc, etc. (which they already do, to a degree).

What, exactly, is your point? That AMD would do the same? No, they wouldn't. Not because they're "nice", but because they are simply in no position to do that. You seem to be forgetting that Intel has about 80% market share. AMD has 20%. If AMD made their products (ex., ATI graphics cards) deliberately slower on Intel systems, that would only benefit nVidia.

If AMD had a bigger market share than Intel you can bet they would make the ATI driver slower on Intel systems. Welcome to the real world.